Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Poems)

This keenly anticipated new collection from the Costa Poetry Award-winner speaks ‘out of fear and grief into splendour and joy’.

Following their award-winning debut, ​Flèche (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan’s gleaming second collection: ​Bright Fear. Through poems which engage fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy, Chan’s latest work explores a family’s evolving dynamics, as well as microaggressions stemming from queerphobia and anti-Asian racism that accompanied the Covid pandemic.

Yet ​Bright Fear remains deeply attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace. It asks how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the ‘constructed space’ of the poem. The contemplative central sequence, ​Ars Poetica, traces the radically healing and transformative role of poetry during the poet’s teenage and adult years, culminating in a polyphonic reconciliation of tongues. Throughout, Chan offers us new and galvanising ways to ‘withstand the quotidian tug- / of-war between terror and love’.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Chan won the 2018 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017 and 2019, receiving an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. Chan co-edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan, and is a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan serves as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and lives in Oxford.

Most mornings, you see the face
of a boy in the mirror. You
expect to fall in love with him,
someday. Meanwhile, your fingers
brush the wrist of another girl as
you jostle into the assembly hall,
and you understand that sin was
never meant to be easy, only
sweet. What might light up the
pond you sat beside in dreams,
eyeing skin and so much depth it
would be years before you dared?
What curvature of tongue might
you taste, as if another’s breath
were blessing? One night, you find
yourself back there. You dream.
A voice says: Hell is not other
people. You sink, stripped of the
glowing dress you wore for
thousands of days.

(fragment poem)

Bright Fear
by Mary Jean Chan
(Poems)
Publisher: ‎Faber & Faber;
Main edition
3 August 2023
Language: ‎English
ISBN-10:‎ 0571378900
ISBN-13: 978-0571378906
Dimensions: ‎15.8 x 0.6 x 20.5 cm
Paperback
72 pages
£10.99

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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